Yes, Bob Kerrey Wants to Go Back to Washington

When Bob Kerrey left the Senate after two terms in 2001 — mainly, he says now, so he could remarry and start a new family away from politics — he was considered a statesmanlike and contemplative presence in a city that still valued both qualities. Kerrey had been a serious presidential candidate, a respected voice on health care and intelligence and co-chairman of one of those bipartisan commissions to reform entitlement programs. His closest friends included the small crowd of Vietnam veterans from both parties — John McCain, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, Chuck Robb, Max Cleland — for whom party loyalty seemed well down the list of daily concerns.

Of that group, only the two failed presidential nominees remain, and McCain, once a symbol of independence, seems like a changed man, seething with partisan bitterness. A half-dozen of the Senate’s other remaining centrists — including Ben Nelson, the Democrat who took the Nebraska seat Kerrey vacated in 2001 — are leaving voluntarily at the beginning of next year, and another, Richard Lugar, was just kicked to the curb in a divisive primary after 36 years of service. On the issues Kerrey says he cares most about, namely entitlements and debt reduction, efforts to find some bipartisan accord have gone nowhere, and those senators who try hardest to bridge the divide seem increasingly beaten down.

And yet here is Bob Kerrey, as he approaches his 69th birthday, returning to Nebraska after a decadelong hiatus in Greenwich Village as the president of The New School, determined to reclaim his seat and his voice in the debate. It’s a decision that puzzles most of Washington. Last month, as we traveled around Nebraska in a wobbly six-seat plane, I suggested to Kerrey that he was like a guy trying to angle his way back into a disaster zone while his like-minded colleagues were desperately seeking safe passage out. He laughed but didn’t dispute the point. “That’s a disturbing metaphor,” Kerrey said.

Democratic leaders in Washington pleaded with Kerrey to run, because he is still the closest thing they have to a star attraction in Nebraska. Harry Reid, the majority leader, even promised to consider Kerrey’s previous service when it comes time to dole out committee assignments. But “just about everybody else who lives in Washington told me not to do it,” Kerrey admitted. “They just said the place has become too toxic and you can’t get things done.”

Kerrey insists he isn’t seeking the Senate seat out of restlessness. (He was offered the chance to become the movie industry’s top lobbyist in 2010 and recently became chairman of GlobalScholar, a for-profit education-software venture.) Nor is he mired in some late-life crisis, trying to reclaim his glory years. It is simply, Kerrey says, a calling to try to lead the Senate toward some consensus. “It’s not that nobody’s doing it,” he told me. “It’s just I feel the need to do it.”

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Young Governor Kerrey in 1984; he was 39 when he took office the year before.Credit
Lincoln Journal Star/Associated Press

This sounds plausible enough coming from a Medal of Honor recipient who spent the better part of two decades in public office. Still it makes you wonder whether Bob Kerrey is deluding himself about what he can achieve if he somehow is elected. There are moments when Kerrey himself seems uncertain of the answer. When a Democrat in North Platte pressed him on whether Washington could make any progress in a bipartisan way, Kerrey’s thoughts seemed momentarily to slip past his internal censor. “One of the concerns I’ve got, literally, is: Am I going to be miserable if I win?” he said. But later, when we were discussing his decision, Kerrey sounded more hopeful. “When you’re standing somewhere else, things look different. It’s good to come back if you can.” He paused. “And if you can’t, that’s fine too.”

I met up with Kerrey in Omaha on the morning after he officially became the Democratic nominee, and we immediately set out on a nine-city tour across the state, mostly short stops where he could address local reporters in airport hangars or conference rooms before climbing back aboard the plane. He had lost the all-black get-up he sometimes wore in New York and had on a white shirt and conservative blue tie, blue blazer and gray slacks. Since his days in the Senate, Kerrey’s hair has turned completely white, and he immediately brought to mind John Slattery’s character from “Mad Men,” in his physical resemblance and in his impolitic brand of humor.

Walking into the tiny airport in Kearney, Kerrey was greeted by Sue Parsons, a former civics teacher. “I want to ask you what we do about Social Security,” she said as he extended his hand. “I mean, it sounds like it’s in the tank, and I’m 58.”

“Your Social Security’s fine,” Kerrey assured her.

“But what about my son?”

“Oh, he’s screwed,” Kerrey said. Then he asked where the cookies were.

The last time Kerrey was on the ballot, Tom Foley was the House speaker and “Seinfeld” was America’s No. 1 show. That means he has never practiced politics in the age of Twitter, when every offhanded quip can and will be used against you, usually in the space of an hour. It also means that a large chunk of the state’s voters, especially the younger ones who might be more inclined to vote for a Democrat, know very little about him. Most of Kerrey’s energy at the moment is directed at reintroducing himself to Nebraska, along with his wife, the screenwriter Sarah Paley, and the couple’s 10-year-old son, Henry, neither of whom have ever lived there. On a car ride through rural North Platte, Kerrey chatted with the Republican city administrator, happily sharing teenage memories of eating cow testicles and seeing ranch hands get their eyes gouged out by rampaging bulls.

But reconnecting, even with friends from his former life, can be harder than Kerrey anticipated. “You don’t want to meet?” he asked an apparently reluctant supporter on a phone call. He sounded hurt. “O.K., but look, 40 percent of what I’m doing here is to meet with old friends, because I’m staying here, win or lose. I’m spending a lot of time with old friends, for no other reason than to spend time with old friends.”

Kerrey’s long absence from the state — his supposed abandonment of so-called Nebraska values in favor of whatever elitist witchcraft you practice in a brownstone near Washington Square Park — has predictably become a central talking point for his opponent, a little-known state senator named Deb Fischer. During her primary against two better-financed opponents, Fischer, a cattle rancher from rural Valentine, won late support from Sarah Palin and from the Nebraska-born billionaire Joe Ricketts, whose super PAC bought more than $250,000 worth of TV ads on her behalf. Even as I arrived in Nebraska on primary night, Americans for Prosperity, the group founded by the conservative businessmen David and Charles Koch, was running a TV ad in Nebraska accusing Kerrey of “ditching our state” and “pushing an East Coast liberal agenda.” (“I don’t know whose prosperity the Koch brothers are interested in,” Kerrey told one audience. “My guess is it’s their prosperity, and they already look pretty prosperous to me.”)

Although the election season hasn’t quite begun in earnest, early public polls showed Fischer ahead by double digits, and most of the people who handicap Senate races for a living consider Kerrey a long shot. Only 32 percent of Nebraskans now call themselves Democrats, compared with 48 percent who self-identify as Republicans, and Barack Obama is as popular in the state as corn blight.

Even so, it’s hard to imagine that Kerrey won’t at least make a competitive race of it — which is probably why Americans for Prosperity and Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS spent more than a combined $200,000 attacking him in the first two weeks after the primary, according to Kantar Media/CMAG, which tracks ad expenditures. The advantage in registration among Republicans in the state doesn’t tell the full story; while the number of Republicans has stayed about constant and the number of Democrats has dropped sharply since Kerrey last ran, the percentage of independent voters has nearly doubled. Theoretically, at least, these are Kerrey’s kind of voters. And while Mitt Romney should carry the state without displacing a single pomaded hair, Nebraskans have a pretty solid history of splitting their votes between parties. Kerrey, who served as governor in the mid-1980s, initially won his seat in 1988, the year that George H. W. Bush trounced Michael Dukakis. Nelson succeeded him in 2001, even as the second Bush carried the state by nearly 30 points.

Also, while Fischer may appeal to Tea Party types as a conservative insurgent, she is relatively untested and entirely new to national issues, which means Kerrey is not the only one who has something to fear from the twittering masses. I mentioned in passing to Kerrey, as we walked on a tarmac, that I wouldn’t want to be a state senator debating him on the intricacies of Medicare and terrorism. “Neither would I,” he flatly replied.

When Democrats win in Nebraska, it’s generally by running as far as they reasonably can from the national party. During the time I watched Kerrey campaign, his stump speech was constantly evolving, but he never failed to praise George H. W. Bush, whom he called “a wonderful president.” And while he says he supports Obama, Kerrey is sharply critical of the president.

“I think he misjudged the nature of the 2008 election and misdiagnosed the economic problem we were facing,” Kerrey told me. “And I think he gave Congress too much authority on the stimulus, and way too much of that was wasted.” Kerrey would preserve the president’s health care law, but he’s frustrated at having to defend it. “I shouldn’t be the one explaining to Nebraskans what’s in the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “What’s it been, two years? It’s a sign of a problem created not by me but by the man who’s the primary architect of the legislation. They just did a terrible job of explaining it.”

Although he favors raising taxes on the rich, while also lowering some corporate rates, Kerrey disdains the current populist rhetoric that pervades the left and praises the generosity of the rich. “My view is that the jerks in our society are evenly divided among all income categories,” he said. “I think it’s important for rich people, especially on the Democratic side, to hear someone say thank you.” I found myself wishing someone would give Bob Kerrey a speaking slot at the Democratic convention, just so I could experience a packed arena going dead quiet.

Most striking, perhaps, is Kerrey’s contempt for the leadership of both parties in Washington, which makes him sound like some 1920s prairie populist. One of his central proposals calls for a constitutional amendment that would ban party caucuses in Congress and establish nonpartisan elections for the House and Senate, much like the unusual system that has governed Nebraska’s Legislature since 1934. The amendment, as Kerrey envisions it, would also eliminate the unlimited campaign donations made permissible by the Supreme Court. Practically speaking, what all of this would mean, he says, is that there would be no “party line” to follow but rather coalitions based on ideology or shared interests.

You might think all of this would unsettle the Democratic leaders who lobbied Kerrey to run in the first place. It really doesn’t, though, because the chief goal of both parties is to hold power. Control of the Senate after November’s elections will most likely come down to a margin of one or two seats, and Republicans and Democrats are defending territory where they’re at a natural disadvantage. Republicans, for instance, are trying to keep a tenuous hold on seats in Massachusetts and Maine. And in addition to Nebraska, Democrats are scrambling to defend seats in Missouri, Montana and North Dakota, all of which stand a better-than-even chance of falling into Republican hands. What party leaders care about is recruiting a candidate who’s well known and who can raise a ton of money, so that even if that candidate doesn’t win, he will at least force Republicans to spend precious time and resources on a state they’d rather be able to take for granted.

All of which means that Kerrey could run around Nebraska calling for a constitutional amendment to reinstate the British crown, and Harry Reid would probably shrug and go back to eating lunch.

If you manage to get yourself elected, of course, those expectations tend to change. When I asked Kerrey if he was really serious about slashing trillions of dollars from entitlement programs or trying to start a movement to ban party caucuses — given that proposals like that would surely sour his relationship with senior Democrats — he blinked at me for a moment. “My guess is they’ll think my proposals are wrong,” he said. “So we have an argument, that’s all. Nobody’s going to die. Nobody’s going to haul me across the river and shoot me, like Burr did Hamilton.”

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Bob Kerrey's Run For His Old Seat

On the road and in the air with the former Nebraska senator.

By Ben Werschkul, Mac William Bishop, Nadia Sussman and Channon Hodge on Publish Date June 12, 2012.
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This more or less summarizes the attitude that Kerrey and his fellow veterans brought to the Senate in decades past. However divisive the rhetoric became, there was some sizable cadre of senators on each side of the aisle that brought a sense of perspective to the debate; they understood the difference between losing a vote, or even your seat, and losing your life.

What Kerrey seems not to fully grasp about the current Senate, no matter how many of his friends warn him, is how little perspective can be found in the place. Most lawmakers in both the House and Senate behave as if losing power and the perks that come with it really does amount to dying, and so they’re wary of making concessions on any major issue that might irritate their most ideological activists and donors.

Nowhere is the resistance to old-school compromise more glaring than in the case of the so-called Gang of Six, which includes a member of the Democratic leadership (Richard Durbin) and one of the Senate’s most conservative Republicans (Tom Coburn). The gang has a rough framework for reducing the debt by something like $4 trillion, both by cutting entitlement spending and by rewriting the tax code; it’s not fully worked out, but it’s enough to serve as a rallying point for the center. More than a dozen Republican senators were initially supportive of the plan, but when Obama embraced it and conservatives like Rush Limbaugh erupted, virtually all of them backed away. Democrats have been more open to making some painful trade-offs, but even so, the party’s top senators have been mostly hostile to the gang’s work, and only four Democrats have tentatively joined.

Kerrey is adamant about enacting a bipartisan debt-reduction deal like the one the gang has proposed. When I asked him why he thought he could achieve what others have failed, he said, “I’ve actually given this a fair amount of thought,” and then he let me in on his theory of success. “It’s got to be somewhat larger. You’ve got to get it to the 10-, 12-senator range. At that point, you can start to have an impact. ”

This didn’t seem especially revelatory. I pointed out that the nominal leaders of the Gang of Six — the Democrat Mark Warner and the Republican Saxby Chambliss — had been working to enlist more senators since the beginning, against their parties’ wishes, and so far had managed to expand the core group to eight, or maybe nine, senators, depending on the week. Did Kerrey think the gang had selected the number six because it had a nice, cozy feel to it?

“Well, look, you may have to use back-bench tactics,” Kerrey said, undeterred. By this he presumably meant the kind of procedural hurdles more often deployed in the House, whereby lawmakers — most famously Newt Gingrich in the 1990s — get their way by holding up votes and paralyzing the body. “You may have to be more militant. You may have to use the same tactics that the extremes are using in order to shut things down. It’s got to be that people take you seriously, and it’s either going to be that they take you seriously because they respect your views or because they’re afraid of you. And frankly, I prefer the second when it comes to actually getting something done.”

It’s easy enough to mock this vision of guerrilla moderates taking over the Capitol. (“We’re going to act like children until you start cooperating like adults!”) And yet if Kerrey manages to get himself elected, his timing may not be as bad as it seems.

A few Democratic senators I spoke with expressed hope that, despite Lugar’s defeat in Indiana, the Tea Party fervor that gripped Congress last year was ebbing, which would give Republicans more room to negotiate on cuts and taxes. In recent weeks, the two sides have come together to support measures on such issues as extending the Export-Import Bank and streamlining drug approvals. “There has been a shift,” New York’s Charles E. Schumer told me. “Is it on the most pressing issues of the moment, like debt and taxes? No. But it’s not post-office namings, either.”

And if it turns out that more senators are willing to challenge their own parties’ orthodoxies in the year ahead, then what a re-emerging center of the Senate will most likely need, even more than an expanded quorum or a specific agenda, is leadership — an elder statesman with national standing to play something like the role McCain played in the early part of the last decade, someone who can threaten to “shut things down” and be taken seriously. “Bob is, in the most constructive sense, an iconoclast,” Michael Bennet, Colorado’s junior senator and a friend of Kerrey’s, told me. “He would instantly be a leader of people who want to pull this place back together again.”

In April 2001, about four months after he left the Senate, Kerrey saw his darkest secret explode into public view. In this magazine, and in an accompanying segment on “60 Minutes,” the journalist Gregory Vistica reported that while in Vietnam, Kerrey led his SEAL team on a mission in which more than a dozen unarmed women and children were massacred. The revelation set off protests at the New School, and although Kerrey spoke about the issue at length and later served on the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of 2001, it also seemed to preclude his return to elective office.

Toward the end of one of our conversations, I asked Kerrey if he thought Fischer or any of the outside groups would use his war record against him. Kerrey shrugged and said he was prepared if they did, and then to my surprise, he tried to explain, at some length, how he thought the episode had changed his life.

“We’re not the worst thing we’ve ever done in our lives, and there’s a tendency to think that we are,” he said. We were sitting alone on a patio in back of a coffee shop in Fremont, accompanied by chirping birds. “People now look at me differently. They look at me more for who I really am, as opposed to this glamorous war-hero, Medal-of-Honor-recipient narrative that I don’t think is truthful. To see me as somebody who may have done something heroic but also did something that was terrible, I think helps people adjust in their own lives to their own attitudes about war and bad behavior. Because we’re not perfect people.”

I asked if that meant he was at peace with what had happened at Thanh Phong in 1969, and he shook his head. “No,” he said, almost inaudibly. “No. No.

“There are times when I’m overwhelmed by sadness. There are times when it’s almost like I’m having a heart attack. Yeah, there are times when I still feel the pain of that night. It’s been very difficult. And in some ways it’s a motivation to run for Senate. It contributes to my wanting to be a candidate, as opposed to it being a deterrent. Because I haven’t been able to do much about it since I talked about it.

“When I say I feel like I have a duty to serve,” Kerrey said, looking directly at me, “I have a duty to serve.”

Spend enough time around politicians, and you will find that their personal motives are hard to discern or disentangle. Perhaps, as Kerrey seemed to be suggesting, he feels a need to “do something” about the past, to ensure that he is not remembered for the worst thing he ever did. There’s no doubt, too, that Kerrey, like just about all aging politicians of a certain caliber, feels he has unfinished business, things he wanted to achieve in office but didn’t. And unlike most aging politicians, he’s being offered the chance — begged, really — to go back and finish what he started.

It’s a good bet, though, that had Kerrey hung around the Senate for another term or come back to Washington as Hollywood’s lobbyist, he wouldn’t be a candidate now. It’s his very distance from the disillusionment that is driving so many of his former colleagues to leave, his detachment from their daily sense of futility, that makes him think he can matter again. Bob Kerrey runs not despite his long absence from Washington, but because of it.